Posted
by
Zonk
on Monday April 17, 2006 @12:13PM
from the watch-it-after-monk dept.

Gamasutra reports that the Major League Gaming organization has signed a deal with the USA network to televise some of their competitions. From the article: "League programming, available at MLGpro.com all year long, will culminate in seven one-hour episodes that will air on the USA Network during the holiday season. In addition, the company also announced a MLG Pro Invasion Bus Tour, which will kick off in the summer and make 100 stops around the country. The Tour features MLG pros traveling across the U.S. in search of the next generation of professional gamers."

Believe it or not, there are many people out there that would rather not play the game itself, but rahter be the spectator in the game. This is what we call "fans" and these are the people lining up in stadiums and piling onto couches to watch the event they feel gives them the most excitement. It's all about entertainment - and right now, the gaming industry is becoming more well known, even thru bad publicity like Jack Thompson.

I agree. There are plenty of occasions when I don't feel like playing a game, but would rather watch. Sometimes I'll host a Warcraft 3 game just to watch others play and learn from their strategy. I think this is a giant untapped market (especially for strategy games).

When you watch football, you are entertained by large men slamming into each other, but what holds your interest is studying the strategy (even if it is only subconciously). The same can be true for video games; but with video games, you

Gaming spectating and TV is huge in Korea and G4 has weathered the storm and survived on cable for years now. Meanwhile, gaming videos show up among the "Popular" results on Google Video quite often and tens of thousdands of people download match videos and view player profiles online.

I'd say the US is more than ready for gaming TV.

I wouldn't be suprised if it's a smashing success for advertisers. For gaming ads, you couldn't hope for a better concentration of the target market. Virtually everyone who s

The "fun" in TV is living vicariously through other people, NOT doing something fun and interesting for yourself. While I think "major league gaming" on TV is a stupid idea, many couch potatoes across the country will have something else to watch for a minute or two as they flip channels.

Look at G4TV -- they have shows like Cheat (in which that cute girl talks about game cheats), and others (including ST:TNG). There's lots of shows that may appeal to us gamers, and I am glad at least G4 is trying some of them out.

Hate to tell you but G4 is gotten rid of most of its gaming roots. The survivers from before the merger are X-Play and Attack of the Show ( which really isn't a surver but what "The Screen Saver" mutated into). The CEO in charge of the merger was fired because ratings are horrible and new management brought in to clean up the mess. The new management has no intrest in reviving any TechTV or game based format.
No one is intrested in a format that will get eyes away from the format, ( in plain english TV

It depends on the game. I don't want to watch people play your averge FPS for 30 minutes, that'd put me to sleep. I can't think of anything I'd gain by watching it, and it moves so fast that unless you're working the controls you probably can't follow it. I WOULD be interested in watching the really good high end guilds do some of the more complicated raids from WoW/EQ/etc. Watching that many people move in coordination is usually pretty impressive, and may help us casual types raise the bar a bit. Any idgi

When I played Tribes 2, me and most of my teammates would sit and watch T2 recordings all of the time. We did this because we wanted to get a look at different tactics and strategies, I suspect this won't be much different.I would also listen to shoutcasts of the matches as they happened, which I found to be pretty entertaining.

But what I want to know is, why the hell do you discourage this type of development? Are the networks not trying to cater to gamers more? Would you rather them not? Bitching about

Endless? They ended quite abruptly if I remember correctly. There were many factors, I'm sorry I lead you to think otherwise. But at one point in time there were a few hundred who played competitively (these people were able to run the game)

The entry barrier to playing sport is a lot higher than turning on the computer.Also with sport you're watching something real, that's actually happening, that depends on your own body and the laws of physics, not some pixels that with the flick of a switch could completely vanish, based on arbitrary rules that could be changed with a single update or sequel.

Imagine if every few years, the rules of football were changed, so the field went from 100 to 200 yards, the ball was made three times lighter and four

The entry barrier to sport is generally lower than video games, financially speaking. A set of sporting clothes, a bat and a ball can be had for way less cash than a high-end gaming PC.The entry barrier to the pro leagues, as far as skills are concerned, is the same for both--you need to be one in a few hundred thousand, at least.

You apparently aren't aware that sports rules and physics have changed arbitrarily over the years. One of the big debates in baseball is over the fact that the change of materials

The 4 major American sports (NBA, MLB, NFL, auto racing) each have over 50 million fans in North America, yet baseball and basketball are nearly non-existant on TV unless you want to pay or live in the right locations. Football is a bit better off because there are at least 4 TV games a week (25% of the action) on broadcast TV from the first week of the season through the 2nd week of the playoffs. And yet ABC has been so disappointed with the Monday night ratings that they moved them to ESPN.

I have no interest in watching other people play video games. I have no interest in watching other people play sports.

My point wasn't that watching either of them was interesting; rather, that the same arguments for boringness applied to both, and that in spite of how we both feel about them being completely uninteresting, there are plenty of people who disagree.

No longer were people satisfied with really playing sports, they play sports games. Now, we just watch other people play sports games while the restful audience slowly melts into the seat cushions to become some vile, disgusting, sentient ooze.

All you need is John Romero [wikipedia.org] to challenge the gaming community to be his "bitch" and every basement crawler will line up for the privilige. I wouldn't be surprised if some chick who strongly resembles Duke Nukem lay claim to the prize.

Speaking of professional gaming. I think it would be more entertaining, if we all lined up to kick this kid [wikipedia.org] in the nuts. I mean, the kid comes out with a mousepad called the 'FATpad', and no, that's not PHAT. Not to mention the insufferable '1' he spells his handle with.

Maybe it can be the prize for defeating Romero at one of his own games?

All I want to know is how much does a professional gamer expect to make in a year? One that does not 'work' for a specific gaming company. Sponserships and whatnot are different, but I wouldn't count the people who actually play games (normally by testing them) for a company on an annual salary basis. Anybody have any ideas? I'm sure the top three in the country make $500k or so a year, but is there actually a pseudo job market?

In Pro gaming you are either the best, or you have a day job.:-)unless you live in Korea of course...

But in the United States your not going to make a living coming in second on computer gaming. Though you can make a good living off of golden T if you are good at it, but thats mostly because you can bilk people at bars by betting money against them, and not so much about official competitive gaming.

In computer gaming you cant get 5 people in a bar and have them bet each other who will win. Especially afte

Okay, personally, for the most part, I think this is going to suck. Just watching someone else play from the FPS perspective, listening to some over excited basement dweller scream "OMG did you just see that!?!?"

What would be much more entertaining would be to run in like a football game. With a dozen camera operators around the level, and a production studio switching cameras, runing replays, and poping up stats windows. Then get some sports announcers to comment on the progress, and fill them up with trivia knowledge on the players, clans, levels, and games.

Since everything happening inside a game of, say, CS is already digital, you would have a lot more options to present useful data. Want to know how fast the one guy shot the other while they were meeting at a corner? Take the frame the first pixel appeared in the winner's viewport and subtract it from the frame he pressed the fire button from or the frame the loser's HP reached zero. Want to know at which distance the encounter happened? No more funny perspective math and guesstimates, just simple Euclidian

What would be much more entertaining would be to run in like a football game. With a dozen camera operators around the level, and a production studio switching cameras, runing replays, and poping up stats windows. Then get some sports announcers to comment on the progress, and fill them up with trivia knowledge on the players, clans, levels, and games.

-Rick

Also, they need to show schematic views of the levels. G4/TechTV used to have a video game show, but they would jump right into some game or level I'd never played. So, I had no idea where people were, etc. If there was a schematic view of the level, showing me that UeberCypher1234 was near the red team's flag, that's a lot more interesting than just seeing that he is in some sort of non-descript hallway, with the commentator pointing out that he is by the bioreactor unit. Something like a mini-map in an RTS, but with a full screen explanation and commentary on the map before the game starts.

Another thing that would make it much easier to follow are custom avatars. This would allow professional players to differentiate themselves from each other, and perhaps create personality followings. Half the fun of watching a sport is to see the legends do their stuff, and know who they are. This could end up requiring some sort of uniform, though, so that things don't get too confusing for both spectators and players in games like Counterstrike (especially after the teams swap sides).

Gaming is different from most other pastimes in that its source material is copyrighted by someone. Nobody gets royalty payments when a football is shown on screen, but what about if Mario or Lara Croft are?

There are a couple of possibilities here.. either game publishers can get paid for their work being featured, or they can consider it free advertising and give it up for free or (more likely) sponsor the competition somehow.

I love the fact that people are screaming how boring this would be to watch? Has anybody watched 7 card hold'em - how popular is that when the content is 10x as boring. It is all about editing the content down to bite size exciting scenes.
I for one would love to see some CS matches from the best players in world on TV (yes i know you can download matches).

1. Only two games as far as I can tell from the website will be played; Super Smash Bros. Melee and Halo 2

2. From the FAQ at the site."Why doesn't MLG have tournaments for PC games?"

Major League Gaming is a competitive console gaming league. There are a huge number of other leagues and tournaments for PC games. As such, MLG does not stand to gain much by holding tournaments for PC games. With exception to fighting games, which are historically considered arcade games, competitive console gaming is relatively new, and MLG is a pioneer in that part of the industry. Competitive console gaming is also open to everybody, as it has a lower barrier to entry as compared to competitive PC gaming, in which those who have the funds necessary to purchase the latest hardware can have a rather significant hardware-based advantage over others.

In other words it's going to be joke!

When I start to see Ladders to a playoff for different types of games (FPS, RTS, or ideally a game with a combination of the two, for example Battlefield 2) which encourage cooperative, strategic play with teams. Why not model the game play to be broadcast like the most successful sports programs on tv today? e.g. real football or soccer game. You have a coach/s giving direction and the over all strategy to the game being played (RTS), and the team members executing the strategy given by coach by it's players working as team (FPS). Then to be able to watch, comment, critique and enjoy watching the teams strategy and game play as they face off, again just like a real sports broadcast. Only then do I see something of this caliber take off to become successful, and not watching 15 sec clips of a players game then 20 mins of background side stories about the players